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A Nation under Our Feet : Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
A Nation under Our Feet Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration Author:Steven Hahn 2004 Bancroft Prize 2003 Merle Curti Award in American History This Pulitzer Prize–winning book is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people—an embryonic black nation. "Steven Hahn's A Nation under Our Feet is the most comprehensive accoun... more »t yet of black politics in the rural South before, during and after the Civil War. Whereas most previous work has focused either on the slave experience or on post-Emancipation struggles, Hahn's book encompasses both and shows the continuities between how blacks fought for self-determination in the two periods … Based on prodigious research in primary sources, A Nation under Our Feet is one of the most important works in American social history to appear in recent years … This book [is] a major achievement and a landmark in African-American history." —George M. Frederickson, The Nation "Hahn argues, in this ambitious and fascinating book, that associations of slaves—centered on kinship, work, and religion—were far more intricate, enduring, and politicized than has been realized … One of the most striking theses here is that black rural laborers, rather than urban, educated freeborn leaders, radicalized Reconstruction." —New Yorker "[A] magisterial new book … It is an awesome and audacious undertaking. Not since W. E. B. Du Bois' monumental Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935) has a historian ventured to structure a political history of the entire post–emancipation South around black politics." —Jane Daily, Chicago Tribune« less